From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat May 31 2003 - 21:55:56 MDT
At 02:39 PM 5/31/03 -0700, Lee Corbin wrote:
>I was television baby, and so many of the
>19th century type sentences uttered by writers of the latter
>century don't stick will enough in my short term memory to
>enable me to follow them very well.
Ha! Try Hegel or Kant! Here's an interesting attempt to justify Hegel's
porridge (from Judith P. Butler, *Subjects of Desire. Hegelian Reflections
in Twentieth-Century France*, Columbia University Press, 1987):
============
Hegel's sentence structure seems to defy the laws of grammar and to test
the ontological imagination beyond its usual bounds. His sentences begin
with subjects that turn out to be interchangeable with their objects or to
pivot on verbs that are swiftly negated or inverted in supporting clauses.
When 'is' is the verb at the core of any claim, it rarely carries a
familiar burden of predication, but becomes transitive in an unfamiliar and
foreboding sense, affirming the inherent movement in `being', disrupting
the ontological assumptions that ordinary language usage lulls us into making.
The rhetorical inversion of Hegelian sentences as well as the narrative
structure of the text as a whole convey the elusive nature of both the
grammatical and human subject. Against the Understanding's compulsion to
fix the grammatical subject into a univocal and static signifier, Hegel's
sentences indicate that the subject can only be understood in its movement.
When Hegel states, `Substance is Subject', the `is' carries the burden of
`becomes', where becoming is not a unilinear but a cyclical process.
Hence, we read the sentence wrong if we rely on the ontological assumptions
of linear reading, for the `is' is a nodal point of the interpenetration of
both `Substance' and `Subject'; each is itself only to the extent that it
is the other because, for Hegel, self-identity is only rendered actual to
the extent that it is mediated through that which is different. To read
the sentence right would mean to read it cyclically, or to bring to bear
the variety of partial meanings it permits on any given reading. [...T]he
very meaning of the copula itself is being expressed as a locus of movement
and plurivocality.
[...]
Hegelian sentences are read with difficulty, for their meaning is not
immediately given or known; they call to be reread, read with different
intonations and grammatical emphases. Like a line of poetry that stops us
and forces us to consider that the way in which it is said is essential to
what it is saying, Hegel's sentences rhetorically call attention to
themselves. The discrete and static words on the page deceive us only
momentarily into thinking that discrete and static meanings will be
released by our reading.
[...]
In reading for multiple meanings, for plurivocity, ambiguity, and metaphor
in the general sense, we experience concretely the inherent movement of
dialectical thinking, the essential alteration of reality. And we also
comes to understand the role of our own consciousness in constituting this
reality inasmuch as the text must be read to have its meaning enacted. [pp.
17-19]
================
Damien Broderick
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